This is a quick reference guide which helps authors to choose the appropriate template and bibliography style file (.bst) according to the journal specific instructions for preparing manuscripts. This guide contains the following:

Name of reference model

Citation format of each model

Name of the template to be used

Name of the bibliography style file to be used

Examples of bibitem listing of three major types, viz., article, book and edited book

Advantages of using Bib database.

What the authors need to do is to understand the citation and bibliography patterns of a particular journal from Elsevier's author instructions page and choose the appropriate template and .bst file from the following.

Model 3 - Numbered

Citation

"... as demonstrated [1,2]. Mettam and Adams [3] obtained a different result ..."

Bib style file

model3-num-names.bst

Template

elsarticle-template-3-num.tex

Note

numcompress.sty has been loaded in the template with nodots option to shorten the lastpage and remove dots from firstname. If you are not using the above template file which we provide, then you have to load the package in the following format:

Model 3a - Numbered

"... as demonstrated^1,2. Mettam and Adams^3 obtained a different result ..." (indicate reference numbers by superscripts)

Bib style file

model3a-num-names.bst

Template

elsarticle-template-3a-num.tex

Note

numcompress.sty has been loaded in the template with nodots,nocompress options to remove dots from firstname and not to shorten the lastpage (default is shorten the lastpage). If you are not using the above template file which we provide, then you have to load the package in the following format:

Model 4 - Name & year

Citation

"... as demonstrated (Van der Geer, 2000). Mettam and Adams (1999) obtained a different result ..."

Bib style file

model4-names.bst

Template

elsarticle-template-4-harv.tex

Note

numcompress.sty has been loaded in the template with nodots option to shorten the lastpage and remove dots from firstname. If you are not using the above template file which we provide, then you have to load the package in the following format:

Model 6 - Numbered

``... as demonstrated.^1,2. Mettam and Adams^3 obtained a different result ... (indicate reference numbers by superscripts)

Bib style file

model6-num-names.bst

Template

elsarticle-template-6-num.tex

Note

numcompress.sty has been loaded in the template with nodots,nocompress options to remove dots from firstname and not to shorten the lastpage (default is shorten the lastpage). If you are not using the above template file which we provide, then you have to load the package in the following format:

With a single press of button, BibTeX will handle all these. The punctuations, font change, compression of page numbers etc. will be taken care of by the appropriate .bst files which authors choose. Without BibTeX authors need to waste a lot of time for doing this one-by-one manually.

Consistency in style

Keeping punctuations/fonts etc. consistent for each bibitem is a very difficult task without BibTeX. Authors need to check each and every bibitems manually for consistency.

Less head-ache in proof-reading

As higher levels of automation is possible for the typesetters to create complex XML format from the Bib database file, the conversion will be error-free. When the authors get the proofs back, their headache in proof-reading the references will be less.

Speed

As the typesetters do the conversion very quickly without waste of time using automated process, it will speed-up the publication process of your paper considerably.

The following examples of three Bib database entries (entries in .bib file), their equivalent LaTeX entry for Model-1 type of references which are obtained when BibTeX is run on .bib file (.bbl file) and its final XML-tagging will help you to understand the above points very clearly: